NASA Is About To Lose Contact With Mars: Here’s Why

NASA’s Curiosity rover and InSight lander will stop moving for over a week as the space agency prepares to lose contact with Mars. According to NASA, this phenomenon happens every two years due to the positions of Mars and Earth.

NASA noted that from Aug. 28 until Sept. 7, both Earth and Mars will be on the opposite sides of the Sun. This is known as the Mars solar conjunction.

During this time, NASA noted that communications with its lander and rover on Mars will be disrupted because the ionized gas expelled by the Sun from its corona can interfere with radio signals.

As a precaution, Curiosity rover will stop driving across the Martian surface while the InSight will keep its robotic arm still.

As for NASA’s orbiters, namely Odyssey and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, they will still continue to collect the data collected by Curiosity and InSight. However, only the Odyssey will attempt the relay the information back to Earth.

NASA’s other orbiter, known as the MAVEN, will still continue with its operations but will not transmit information back to the space agency.

In other words, information such as images and data from NASA’s various missions on Mars will temporarily stop for more than a week during the solar conjunction.

“It’s that time again,” Roy Gladden, the head of the Mars Relay Network at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory said in a statement. “Our engineers have been preparing our spacecraft for conjunction for months.”

“They’ll still be collecting science data at Mars, and some will attempt to send that data home,” he added. “But we won’t be commanding the spacecraft out of concern that they could act on a corrupted command.”

Once the Mars solar conjunction ends, NASA’s vast network of Earth-based radio antennas known as Deep Space Network will establish communications with the various missions on the Red Planet.

Once communications have been established, the network will spend about a week downloading the data collected by the missions. The operations of NASA’s rover, lander and orbiters will then resume once the network has finished downloading the necessary information.